Admiral James Stavridis, USN:

[W]e all begin as readers.

Then something happens and you start to think … you want to be part of the conversation. You step from reading to thinking to talking about books and ideas.

And you realize that all that reading and thinking and talking is—in the end—like trying “to nail whispers to a wall” as a writer said once. “Writing freezes thought and offers it up for inspection.”

Whittaker Chambers, from “The Direct Glance” in Cold Friday:

I speak with a certain urgency both because I believe that history is closing in on this people with a speed which, in general they do not realize or prefer not to realize, and because I have a sense that time is closing in on me so that, at this point, I do not know whether or not I shall be given time to complete what I seek to say. I feel, too, a sense of my own inadequacy in may ways. I cannot claim to speak with the authority of many whose learning is greater, whose competency is certified by years of devout effort in special acreages of the mind. I may not claim for the larger meanings of what I shall say: This is truth. I say only: This is my vision of truth; to be checked and rechecked (as I myself continually check and recheck it) against the data of experience. Every book, like every life, is issued ultimately, not to those among whom it appears and lives, but to the judgment of time, which is the sternest umpire. What serious man could wish for his life or his book a judgment less final?

John Boyd, from Destruction and Creation:

According to Gödel we cannot— in general—determine the consistency, hence the character or nature, of an abstract system within itself. According to Heisenberg and the Second Law of Thermodynamics any attempt to do so in the real world will expose uncertainty and generate disorder. Taken together, these three notions support the idea that any inward-oriented and continued effort to improve the match-up of concept with observed reality will only increase the degree of mismatch.

John Boyd, from The Strategic Game of Interaction and Isolation:

Physically we interact by opening-up and maintaining many channels of communication with the outside world, hence with others our there, that we depend upon for sustenance, nourishment, or support.

Mentally we interact by selecting information from a variety of sources or channels in order to generate mental images or impressions that match-up with the world of events or happenings that we are trying to understand and cope with.

Morally we interact with others by avoiding mismatches between what we say we are, what we are, and the world we have to deal with, as well as by abiding by those other cultural codes or standards that we are expected to uphold.